This article focused on the challenges of teaching a high level thinking course, such as the sciences to students who suffer from learning disabilities. The most prevalent conditions are communication disorders, ADHD, learning disorders and emotional/behavioral disorders. The article talks about how these disorders commonly interfere with tasks that might appear simple to someone else or unrelated to their disorder. Students with ADHD or a learning disorder can have hard times interpreting visual graphs or even trouble remembering what they heard in class. Receptive language problems is when an individual struggles to understand the language of someone else and this could have dire consequences when a teacher is trying to teach the foreign language of Biology to this student. As a solution, they talked about helping students by having students set goals they can achieve in the class, giving students visual handouts to sum up information, using numerous memory devices and even reviewing the textbook structure with them. In addition, they encouraged variation within the class so that the teacher could reach out to more students. The article also emphasized showing students that these learning devices (such as mnemonics, vocabulary cards, or visual summaries) can help teach students how to study for science.
I found that this article to be very informative. I was surprised at some of the complications a learning disorder could create. I would have never guessed that a student's ADHD could affect their ability to, for example, read a graph. I found that many of their suggestions seemed simple enough to be able to implement to the entire class because it would be beneficial to everyone, not just to the students with learning disabilities. Their methods were simple and direct (summed up in a table at the bottom of the article) but provided huge insights to teaching. By mirroring the methods of learning in your own teaching (i.e. helping students create vocabulary note-cards with mnemonic devices or handing out those friendly concept maps to students) it could subconsciously show the students effective tools to remember and understand information. If teachers actually implemented this in their class and showed students how to make these note-cards or helped them draw their own concept map, I believe it could do wonders for the study habits of high-school students as well as students with learning disabilities. Of course, varying instruction is a must as well. Very simple article but very strong messages incorporated.
http://www3.nsta.org/main/news/stories/science_teacher.php?category_ID=88&news_story_ID=53487
This article focused on the challenges of teaching a high level thinking course, such as the sciences to students who suffer from learning disabilities. The most prevalent conditions are communication disorders, ADHD, learning disorders and emotional/behavioral disorders. The article talks about how these disorders commonly interfere with tasks that might appear simple to someone else or unrelated to their disorder. Students with ADHD or a learning disorder can have hard times interpreting visual graphs or even trouble remembering what they heard in class. Receptive language problems is when an individual struggles to understand the language of someone else and this could have dire consequences when a teacher is trying to teach the foreign language of Biology to this student. As a solution, they talked about helping students by having students set goals they can achieve in the class, giving students visual handouts to sum up information, using numerous memory devices and even reviewing the textbook structure with them. In addition, they encouraged variation within the class so that the teacher could reach out to more students. The article also emphasized showing students that these learning devices (such as mnemonics, vocabulary cards, or visual summaries) can help teach students how to study for science.
I found that this article to be very informative. I was surprised at some of the complications a learning disorder could create. I would have never guessed that a student's ADHD could affect their ability to, for example, read a graph. I found that many of their suggestions seemed simple enough to be able to implement to the entire class because it would be beneficial to everyone, not just to the students with learning disabilities. Their methods were simple and direct (summed up in a table at the bottom of the article) but provided huge insights to teaching. By mirroring the methods of learning in your own teaching (i.e. helping students create vocabulary note-cards with mnemonic devices or handing out those friendly concept maps to students) it could subconsciously show the students effective tools to remember and understand information. If teachers actually implemented this in their class and showed students how to make these note-cards or helped them draw their own concept map, I believe it could do wonders for the study habits of high-school students as well as students with learning disabilities. Of course, varying instruction is a must as well. Very simple article but very strong messages incorporated.
Sammy D.